Mel Gibson: Hair and Now

Mel Gibson's tired of hearing women complain about their waxing woes. The Oscar winner, who had his legs waxed for a scene in his new film What Women Want, says that the procedure is not the nightmare it's cracked up to be.

"It doesn't hurt that bad," Gibson admits to TV Guide Online. "But when I say that, women all come up and say, 'Yeah, well try waxing the bikini line.' I'm not going there."

In the romantic comedy (opening Friday), Gibson plays Nick Marshall, a Casanova who is suddenly given the power to read women's innermost thoughts. Determined to find the answer to that question himself, the star of the last summer's hit film The Patriot approached an expert in the field. "I asked my dad one night on the phone what he thought women wanted," he recalls. "He answered, 'Everything!'"

Gibson apparently has an easier time getting inside the heads of his children, specifically daughter Hannah. "When she was 14 and 15, I would think, 'Boy, is she listening to any of this? I'm giving her this stuff, I'm trying to help. I don't know if she's getting any of it. Is it making an impact?'" he explains. "And then four years pass and you hear her say something and you go, 'I know where she heard that.' It's that 'Wow' moment when realize she heard it all."

After completing work on What Women Want, Gibson shaved his head — leading some to question what it was that he wanted. "I wanted to go to Florence and not be noticed," he says. "The paparazzi in Italy are really rampant. So I just shaved my head in order to achieve some sort of anonymity. It actually worked. For three days I got away with murder.

"It's amazing," he continues. "As soon as you do something like that, you notice that everybody else has done the same thing. Everyone had sunglasses and a bald head in Florence when I was there. I swear, you would walk past a baldheaded guy every five minutes. You would be tempted to put your head together with him and make an ass of yourself."